


<lj-cut text="you see who I am and what I did">

by tomato_greens



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bakery, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Documentation, Fandom, M/M, pop punk - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:00:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22094491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: Rolling StoneNo Jack Zimmermann Is An Islandby Jennifer S. HaradaAfter avoiding me for a week, Jack Zimmermann calls to ask me to meet him at a bakery. Or maybe a diner; he’s not sure what to call it. A brunch place, although they make great pies, too.“Sure,” I say, “whatever you want, Mr. Zimmermann.”“Jack,” says Zimmermann. His voice is higher than I expect it to be, and his Québécois accent more pronounced. “I’ll see you there.”
Relationships: Eric "Bitty" Bittle/Jack Zimmermann, Larissa "Lardo" Duan/Shitty Knight
Comments: 39
Kudos: 134
Collections: OMGCP AU Bang 2019





	

**Author's Note:**

> MANY THANKS to my fantastic artists, [Matthew](https://amessnamedwidogast.tumblr.com) (whose beautiful work is scattered throughout the story) and [Sav](https://tangotangredi.tumblr.com) (whose beautiful work is on tumblr [here](https://tangotangredi.tumblr.com/post/190030644379/you-see-who-i-am-and-what-i-did-by-tomato-greens)). 
> 
> Further thanks to [familiar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/familiar/pseuds/familiar), who, first of all, helped me come up with the fic title today while we were standing in a Uniqlo talking about Kent Parson for a solid sixty minutes, and who also gave me an excellent beta-read, some of which I ignored even though familiar was completely 100% right, so, sorry about that. 
> 
> Lastly, soundwise, if you're into that sort of thing, Rimouski lands somewhere between [The Germs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vuveZtlkKw) and [Choking Victim](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIOsw2wK4os), while SMH is much more [Green Day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUTGr5t3MoY) than anything else.

_Rolling Stone_

Menu / Music / TV / Movies / Politics / Culture / Video / Charts / RSPro

HOME > MUSIC > MUSIC FEATURES

NOVEMBER 30, 2019 9:00 AM ET

**No Jack Zimmermann Is An Island**

_SMH’s taciturn star finally gets a little wordy._

By Jennifer S. Harada

After avoiding me for a week, Jack Zimmermann calls to ask me to meet him at a bakery. Or maybe a diner; he’s not sure what to call it. A brunch place, although they make great pies, too.

“Sure,” I say, “whatever you want, Mr. Zimmermann.”

“Jack,” says Zimmermann. His voice is higher than I expect it to be, and his Québécois accent more pronounced. “I’ll see you there.”

The bakery/diner/brunch place is in a converted 19th-century Classical monstrosity, tucked between other 200-year-old private homes and hard to find despite the aid of my trusty GoogleMaps. I walk in to find Zimmermann, a famously early riser, already sitting at a charmingly appointed table by the front window, sucking down a black coffee. The room is otherwise empty.

Offstage, Zimmermann is calm. Last night, his body writ large across the screens of Madison Square Garden, he’d been shaking – everything except his famously soft hands, which were steady on his custom Ibanez bass. But this morning, back on his home turf in Providence, he seems to have found his zen.

“His chill,” Zimmermann’s bandmate B. “Shitty” Knight corrects me when I make this observation, popping out unexpectedly from the counter at the other end of the room. (For the record, Knight’s first name, despite intensive research by multiple reliable outlets, remains contested. After my own deep-dive into the issue, I’ve decided I support a relatively obscure theory that Knight does not, in fact, have a first name.) “Jack’s not really spiritual enough to appropriate the term zen, I think.” Knight flashes me the kind of smile he’s famous for – splendidly mustachioed, and a little self-righteous.

Although my mother’s family has been active in their Buddhist community and temple in LA for at least four generations, not to mention in Japan before that, I decide not to explain my relationship to the word. Knight is not only SMH’s guitarist and occasional lyricist, he’s by far their most active voice on social media, veering from social justice PSAs to arguments with fans whose opinions he finds offensive. Knight comes off as extremely chill, but historically, he can’t let go. He is a tenacious ally, or tries to be, vocally enough that he sometimes runs afoul of the Twitter police – but I’m here to interview Zimmermann, after all.

“I have a Twitter,” Zimmermann says uncertainly when I ask. “I don’t remember the password. I did use LiveJournal, though, a long time ago.”

A quick glance at Zimmermann’s Twitter (@jzimms; bio: “I like music and photos”) proves this true; his feed hasn’t updated in ten years. I check LiveJournal – the long-form blogging site is still online, slicker than it was 20 years ago but otherwise not much changed – and find that, surprisingly, his journal still exists.

“Yeah, I can’t remember the password to that either. People have been telling me to get rid of it for years,” he admits.

I click on the most recent entry and am greeted by a rush of bizarre nostalgia: it’s a picture of Zimmermann and former Rimouski bandmate Kent Parson, grinning at each other, flushed, impossibly young. I can’t believe it’s still online. The accompanying text is brief: “zimms & me went to eat ice cream. he got vanilla (of course) & i got something a little fancier. -parse”

I calculate quickly. Three days before Zimmermann’s infamous OD.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” Zimmermann says when I show him the screen of my phone, unsubtly changing the subject: “Why don’t we order some food?”

_X_

_X_

**SMH - JZ + KP 4eva**

Date: 2015-07-13 04:13 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

Okay, sorry, I know sometimes meme isn’t into the whole JZimms + Parse situation, but - forgive me for I have sinned, etc.

Now that we’ve got the haters out of the way: oh my god, did you see those photos of him with Parse? OMG DO YOU THINK THERE’S GOING TO BE A RIMOUSKI REUNION?

Link Reply Thread Hide 217 comments

-

Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 04:15 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

LOL, with the looks on their faces in those photos?? There’s never gonna be a Rimouski reunion, despite all the blood sacrifices I’ve performed.

-

Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 04:16 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

I thought they looked like they were having a nice time.

-

  
Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 04:18 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

DA

Uh…what are you talking about? JZimms literally looks like he’s going to die, you can barely even see his eyes because his eyebrows are so furrowed. And Parse just looks out of it, like I know he’s said he’s sober now and everything but either he’s hopped up on something or he’s drugged out of his mind just to be able to talk to JZimms. His pupils are totally blown, you can barely even see his eye color.

This is the problem with you guys who keep pushing for Rimouski to tour again. It’s obvious even from this one photo that they’re still not able to be around each other in a healthy way. You really should be thinking about their mental health as queer performers in a highly masculine, highly homophobic space like punk music. They’re not here to create for YOU. They’re artists, with long troubled histories. You really need to respect that and their relationship, whatever it looks like.

I’m not a “hater” by the way. I’m just thoughtful about this stuff.

-

Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 04:17 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

1) Well, that’s completely nonsense crazy, but it did make me wonder:

2) Did we ever even figure out KP’s eye color?

-

Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 05:40 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

Blue? Hazel? Brown? Green? Probably not brown…probably. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen Parse’s eyes look the same color twice. In any photo, lmao.

-

Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 04:21 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

A AYRT RT

So I wasn’t gonna go there, I just meant they looked old and grumpy. But jeez, all right.

Also, I think you mean a highly masculine, highly homophobic space like /pop/ punk…you know…that genre where the dudes keep making out on stage….

-

Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 04:28 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

nah, I mean, AYRT was kinda nuts but we all know that it’s still pretty homophobic, right? how many of those dudes have actually been in public gay relationships? it was all just Pete Wentz making out with everyone.

plus really? SMH is definitely pop punk. but Rimouski was harder, and KP’s solo work is a lot of things including sometimes weird as hell but I wouldn’t call it pop punk.

-

Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 04:36 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

WHAT YEAR IS IT WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT PETE FUCKING WENTZ FOR THE LOVE OF GOD I THOUGHT WE ALL LEFT THIS BEHIND IN 2009

-

Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 04:43 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

unfortunately for all of us once a bandom always a bandom.

-

Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 06:29 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

Parse, I’ll grant you, is as gay as they come, but I don’t think we can safely call JZimms queer when his only public relationship was with that tennis player, whatshername.

-

Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 08:59 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

I won’t stand for this Camilla Collins erasure!!!

-

Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 08:59 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

+1

-

Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 08:01 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

Uh, what would you call Rimouski if NOT a public relationship?

-

Re: SMH - JZ + KP 4eva  
Date: 2015-07-13 08:01 am (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

LOLOLOL!

What I wouldn’t give for robots.txt not to have deprived us of Parse’s Xanga. I weep to think of what could have been!

_X_

XANGA.COM - THE WEBLOG COMMUNITY

 **xxparsexx**  
view my entire profile  
sign my guestbook

 **Real Name:** get it like parsecs but also like sex haha  
**Birthday:** July 4, 1982  
**Gender:** m  
**Location:** wherever ur not  
**Occupation:** makin’ tunezzzz  
**Industry:** muzak  
**Expertise:** guitar, drums, yelling, making JZ laugh (special skill), making my mom sigh and say aw honey to me whenever I come home, mostly guitar though  
**Hobbies:** aren’t these questions kind of striking you as redundant  
**Email:** Click Here

Stats: Member since 2/5/2000

Your blog is your castle - go premium!

<< / >>

**Wednesday, September 12, 2001**

i mean what are we all supposed to do now

we have this dream and it’s real but it’s also a joke, we have a demo no one cares about, it’s fun to be douching it up in LA smoking a little & schmoozing a lot & living off of JZ’s dad’s money or whatever but we’re just some…messy homos screwing around. well zimms doesn’t like to be labeled but i can tell you i’m just some motherfucking homo from buffalo, ny with one mom & one sister & one dead dog & barely a high school diploma & what am i supposed to do about all of this?

if we had a record out and fans besides my kid sister we could do something. talk to some people. SOMEthing. but I heard they don’t take boys like me in the army, you know.  
1:28 AM [PST]

**Tuesday, September 11, 2001**

oh shit, are you seeing this, what the fuck, what the fuck, can you believe it  
12:59 PM [PST]

**Saturday, September 8, 2001**

i take back what i said last time because one of LA’s greatest qualities is that you can eat ice cream basically year round, which i know technically you could do in buffalo but who would want to  
4:27 PM [PST]

**Sunday, September 2, 2001**

on a scale of 0 to drops of jupiter how embarrassing would it be if we wrote a song about some goddamn weather? zimms & i agree that palm trees are nice & all but the fact that the quality of the air barely changes is slowly driving me insane, not that i wasn’t already insane but it’s really starting to get to me. how about this for lyrics (zimms can do his metal growl impression in the background):

THE LEAVES ON THE TREES  
ARE GREEN LIKE DISEASE  
THEY’LL NEVER BE RED  
I WISH I WERE DEAD

zimms said “ha ha” again which i am taking as approval so watch for our next demo, THE FALL, NOT A METAPHOR  
8:19 PM [PST]

**Tuesday, August 28, 2001**

tyler says he & his friends are not into christian science but i don’t know any christian scientists to ask if they’re into sXe. JZ remains uninterested.  
2:50 PM [PST]

**Monday, August 27, 2001**

hey do you think sXers and christian scientists would get along? there used to be a christian scientist reading room on my walk home from from middle school & sometimes when i got really bored i would stop & read the books in the window. they didn’t have good displays & personally i’m not much of a christian but sometimes when you have to walk the same couple miles twice a day you just need something to distract you. anyway i don’t remember that much about whatever it was they wanted you to believe but i remember you don’t take medicine or drugs which all the sXers I know of would approve.  
2:01 PM [PST]

**Sunday, August 26, 2001**

speaking of guys from hs i was talking to tyler for the first time in a while & i found out he’s sXe now which is crazy to think. he sold me my first w33d. it was even good, it was really mellow. i respect straight edge & everything but i would never.

i just asked zimms & he said “ha ha” like he says to 90% of things when he’s taken a xanax (don’t worry it’s prescribed) so i guess he’s not into it either.  
11:14 AM [PST]

**Wednesday, August 22, 2001**

sorry for being gone. i tried to make a joke about all of our fans missing us just now, JZ has told me more than once that i’m a narcissist but i know no one’s reading this, but i can’t really. my dog died so i went home to visit my mom. :(

it was good to see her & my lil sis & i didn’t miss buffalo at all but i got to see some of the guys from hs & that was cool but Trixie was the best fucking dog that ever existed and that’s just cold hard facts & we had her since i was in fourth grade & even though i wasn’t living with her i always knew she was wagging her lil tail and eating her lil treats & that helped a lot whenever i missed home, don’t tell anyone but sometimes i get sick of being a big rock star in LA. i’ll miss her.

[TRIXIE.jpeg] [trixieandmom.jpeg] [trixr4kidz.jpeg]  
2:39 PM [PST]

**Friday, August 3, 2001**

almost a whole month of being 19, baby, & it’s been great! zimms & me & the glory of SoCal await.

that kind of rhyme’s why they pay me the big bucks and by they I mean zimms and by bucks I mean blow jobs. oops did I say that out loud?  
10:01 AM [PST]

<< / >>

_X_

“You live – I’m sorry, where?” Bitty asked.

“Here,” said Jack, which was a very Jack kind of thing to say, although in the pan-Eastern anarcho-communist Iggy Pop fan club IRC chat where they’d met, it always came across as coolly and deliberately laconic, whereas right now it was coming across as a big fucking red flag.

“Here?” Bitty repeated.

Jack waved a hand at the floating pile of garbage he was evidently expecting Bitty to sleep in. Bitty crossed his arms, and then thought he might seem aggressive or rude, so uncrossed them, after which he remembered he was a high school dropout who had broken two assholes’ noses plus, accidentally, his English teacher Mrs. Simmons’s molar, before running away to live in his 22-year-old Canadian internet boyfriend’s eco-conscious artmaking cooperative. He crossed his arms again. “I thought you said you lived in, like, a house.”

“It’s called the Haus,” Jack said, waving his hand again. Bitty squinted: and at the end of the long flat wreck, yes, THE HAUS was picked out in a careful hand, bright white against the blackish-blue hull. “It’s a houseboat, technically.”

“Technically,” Bitty sniffed, but he wasn’t going to punk out now, so he picked up his rucksack and gamely tried to climb aboard. Everything seemed fine until the – Jesus Christ, the boat – reacted to his weight by shoving itself away from the dock, leaving him in a precarious, widening split above the grayish waters of the Samwell God Damn River. “You’re lucky I’m flexible,” Bitty said, flinging out his arms for balance. “You get used to it,” Jack promised, hauling him up. And Bitty tried. Honest, he did.

_X_

Zimmermann assures me that everything – from the soft-boiled egg split in two and perched on a bed of micro-greens inside a sliced croissant to the pecan-ricotta pancakes smeared with homemade boysenberry jam – is delicious.

“The pie is the real treat,” he explains, craning his neck to glance at the various baked goods in the glass case on the counter. Zimmermann is tall and athletically built, if thin; Parson mentioned, in the only major interview they gave during Rimouski’s brief and prodigious run, that they’d met each other in an invite-only youth hockey league. He certainly doesn’t look like someone who knows his way around a maple-crusted apple pie, heavy on the vanilla ice cream, but as he walks me through each pie on the menu, it’s obvious that he’s sampled every one. “I think it’s probably too early for a fresh slice, though. Usually he starts selling them around lunch time.”

“He?” I ask, since I haven’t seen anyone here besides Zimmermann and Knight, and the tiny silent dining room seems far removed from the bustle of a busy kitchen.

“Eric Bittle, the owner,” Knight supplies when Zimmermann explains the difference between a boysenberry and a marionberry. “He used to be in SMH, actually, a thousand years ago.”

The name sounds familiar, though at first I can’t put my finger on why. After some surreptitious Googling while Knight asks about the in-ground pool Zimmermann is installing in the backyard of his Providence summer home, I suss it out; Bittle must be “Bitty,” the little-known founding member of SMH whose full name was never revealed before he left the band. He’d provided backup vocals and rhythm guitar. Given Zimmermann’s history, I wouldn’t have guessed they’d kept in touch.

Since this meeting, I’ve discovered a few grainy photos, archived in fan screenshots of various defunct social media websites – Bittle as a short, trim, blond maybe 17-year-old peeking out from behind a cheap Epiphone, and exactly one leaked demo hiding in the depths of YouTube. While the recording quality is terrible, it’s still possible to pick out the musical energy that’s rocketed SMH to fame. Bittle’s guitar is merely serviceable, but his voice, bopping behind Zimmermann’s pop-punk moans, is enthusiastic and weirdly endearing; while listening, I found myself wishing for video. But SMH came of age before video was easily archivable, and none exists of this earliest incarnation.

“Yeah, we were thinking about adding a hot tub, too, but we want to leave room for the herb garden,” Zimmermann says to Knight.

My ears prick up. While Knight, drummer Larissa “Lardo” Duan, and guitarist Justin “Ransom” Oluransi are all reserved about their private lives (the Twitterverse recently exploded when, after a solid decade of speculation, Knight and Duan showed up on SMH’s most recent tour with wedding rings and a dogged refusal to confirm whether they had married each other or had simply planned coinciding weddings), Zimmermann is the most notoriously private of the bunch. In a 2014 clip that went viral, Zimmermann responded to one reporter’s question about his use of the plural pronoun with a dead-eyed stare and a monotone, “I use the Royal We.”

_X_

**Three guesses who I saw???**

So, okay, as you know I moved to Providence for love.

  * And that was a huge mistake. 
  * Listen, sometimes you do things for love?
    * And love betrays you.
    * And then you low-key live out of your car for a month.
      * And then you find a new job and a new apartment and a nice roommate, thank God.
      * (Thank you for opening your home to me, **@cleavetome** , while I was in need.)
  * But you spend the whole month crying your heart out and listening to Rimouski in your car.
    * Sometimes you waste gas and then you cry extra hard because you can’t afford to waste gas? You know?
  * And then the morning of your big interview, which is at 2PM, you end up spending five bucks you can’t afford at this out-in-middle-of-basically-nowhere-café.
    * Seriously, Providence is not a big city.
      * And the residential areas don’t usually feel _that_ far removed from reality, but somehow this café was in like a 1700s deadzone.
    * Okay, I just said that, I don’t know when the houses were from, but you could tell they were old. Classy old, but New England classy where they’re kind of falling apart.
      * On that note, New England is so fucking weird. Don’t move here. People who are from here won’t tell you this because they’re essentially delusional but trust your Aunty Trina **@badbrain** , it suxxxx.
  * _Anyway_ , you’re buying a drip coffee to calm your nerves and inject some energy into yourself so you won’t look like you’ve been low-key living out of your car for a month, and then you also buy a cookie because they look _so good_ and everything has been _so hard._
    * It was pretty good, better than, like, Panera, not as good as Buono’s.
    * Don’t tell the guy behind the counter, though, he’ll probably read you to shreds. 
      * Seriously, maybe actually worth it to go there just to interact with this guy, he’s like a tiny blond twink with an accent and a bitchy attitude, I’m in love with him even though our love can never go anywhere due to the obvious problems.
        * Mostly that I am ace. And also a lesbian. 
        * And he almost certainly has never touched a woman besides his mom.
          * Ew, not like that!
        * Anyway. I digress. 
    * Also, I got a Snickerdoodle because it was cheapest, but maybe some of the fancier cookies were better? There was a maple-crusted chocolate chip situation that looked pretty nice. 
      * …Should I stop talking about cookies?
      * Are you tired of me heightening the tension? 
      * I had to put my English degree to SOME kind of use.
  * LONG STORY SHORT
  * GUESS WHO I SAW
  * JACK ZIMMERMANN
    * THAT ONE
    * **_THE_** **_JZ_**
    * _(…ZIMMS!!!)_
      * SMH AND RIMOUSKI JACK ZIMMERMANN
      * ALSO THOSE WEIRD EXPERIMENTAL BANDS HE PLAYS WITH SOMETIMES THAT WE ALL DON’T LISTEN TO BECAUSE THEY KIND OF SUCK
  * YOU KNOW
    * JACK 
      * FUCKING!!!!!!!!! 
    * ZIMMERMANN
  * Okay, to be totally fair, I’m _PRETTY SURE_ it was him. I guess potentially it wasn’t, I mean, celebrity lookalikes exist. But I’m like 95.5% sure it was him. 
    * He looks pretty…good? Healthy?
      * If the SMH hiatus was really about him going to rehab again then it looks like it’s working, he’s gained a little muscle since the Feel The Call tour when he…well I don’t want to be disloyal or rude but when he looked pretty strung out on stage to be honest.
    * He’s definitely a regular or something because he and the bitchy blond guy were palling around like they’d known each other a long time. 
    * His eyes are weirder in person, although to be fair he wasn’t grimly smoldering at a camera, he was mostly drinking coffee or talking to the bitchy guy so maybe it’s just because I’d like look over secretly and accidentally catch a SEARING ICY GAZE.
      * Kind of got the feeling he was mad anyone else was in the café, lmaoooo.
    * DO YOU THINK PARSE IS AROUND HERE? 
      * ARE THEY MAKING OUT IN SECRET PROVIDENCE CORNERS? 
      * I KNOW SOME WEIRD SECRET PROVIDENCE CORNERS. I COULD SKULK AROUND AND REPORT BACK.
    * Okay, okay, mostly I kid! But seriously, he looks good. He’s so private I have no idea. But I can tell you the last time I feel like he looked this happy…those pictures were taken of him and Parse last year.
      * Remember those pictures? UGH. 
      * I’m not a conspiracy theorist normally and I KNOW I spent about ten posts deeply analyzing them but I just want to remind you all of that little furrow between JZ’s eyebrow that somehow looks distinguished instead of anguished.
      * Not to market my content, but to totally market my content, you can find my analysis of those images with the tag **#the badbrain pimmspocalypse** , btw, new people who followed this blog after I lost my mind and never got to experience it. 



VERY IMPORTANT AND SINCERE FOLLOW-UP QUESTION, DOES JZ SECRETLY KIND OF LIVE IN PROVIDENCE? DO I NOW LIVE IN THE SAME CITY AS JACK “SO MUCH HATE” ZIMMERMANN? IS THAT A REASON FOR ME TO STAY HERE IN THIS NEW JOB I KIND OF LIKE AND SEE IF I CAN STICK IT OUT????

**May 12, 2016 \- 792 notes**

_X_

**The Swallow - Online Edition**   
_We Always Penitus Potes_

Vol. 15, Issue 8, March 2005

“News” Quickies / Features / Opinions / **Arts** / Archives / About / Write With Us

**SMH Stands For…Super Mega Hotties???  
**by TriloByte and Banana Slip

As you know, we here at the Swallow love talent, drive, and wild success as much as the next student news junkies, but what we really care about is a symmetrical jawline. And Jack Zimmermann, Samwell’s most famous dropout, delivers on all fronts.

Oh, and so do his bandmates, drummer Lardo and guitarists Sh*tty and Bitty, better known as Larissa Duan, Art, ’05; B. Knight, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Political Science, ’04 (seriously, we went to the registrar and everything, but even though Banana Slip knows him from philosophy classes, no amount of investigative work helped us figure out what that B. stood for); and…Bitty, not a Wellie, still a cutie, _probably_ over 18?

SMH - letters which, as far as we can tell, don’t stand for anything concrete - has performed in basement shows throughout Samwell over the past six months, making a name for themselves in the, okay, admittedly pretty subdued local punk scene. Their fun, fast-paced music lands somewhere between Green Day and Choking Victim, and occasionally indulges in a heartland twang, perhaps part of Zimmermann’s musical legacy as the son of Bad Bob Zimmermann (if you’ve been living under a rock since the ‘70s, Bad Bob is kind of like Canada’s French-speaking answer to Bruce Springsteen, except cooler since he’s not from New Jersey and still has all of his hair). Not that the younger Zimmermann will answer any questions about Bad Bob, _tragiquement_ , as TriloByte has had a crush on Bad Bob since that famous undershirt photo on his second _Rolling Stone_ cover in 1987.

Their music being fun and their members being hot, the only major issue with SMH is probably that we had to trek all the way out to their boat - yes, I said boat - to listen to them play. Given that it’s March in Massachusetts, it was obviously cold enough to freeze noses off, and standing by the Samwell River watching some punks beat on a barge didn’t help matters. The openers - ska parody band Whiskey and the Chads, another alumnae band in shades of riot grrrl, The Well Well Wells, and the most traditional hardcore of the lineup, The Pataters - were fine, but by the end of the show, no one but Zimmermann looked like they were having a good time; our total new fave Bitty looked particularly miserable, and was fully shivering whenever Lardo made everyone stop playing so she could ensure that no river water splashing up onto the deck was going to electrocute anyone.

On the walk back home, we agreed that we really dug SMH, but we would never again stand outside to listen to them unless temperate climes were a guarantee of the ticket sale. 

In conclusion: Jack Zimmermann, we will always love you, Sh*tty and Bitty, you make our hearts go on, but Lardo is very obviously the only one who’s going to survive any metaphorical OR LITERAL icebergs that crash into this mess.

_X_

Jack’s old beat-up Fender amp wasn’t too different from the 10-watt Marshall Bitty had left behind when he snuck out of his parents’ house, hitched a ride to Atlanta with his 29-year-old anarcho-syndicalist buddy Tommy, accidentally took Tommy seriously when he joked that Bitty should suck him off rather than fork over five bucks for gas money, apologized about a hundred times while Tommy reminded Bitty that he wasn’t a fucking gay-ass pedo for fuck’s sake, escaped on a northbound Greyhound, and then, on the last piece of advice he’d ever take from Tommy, switched to a cheaper Fung Wah bus for the rest of the ride up to Boston, which, despite his life thus far as a Bible-Belt-born-and-bred-satin-sash-wearing-junior-champion-figure-skater-cum-queer-as-in-fuck-you-sludgecore-mosher, turned out to be the second-closest he’d ever felt to death.

The Fender didn’t need a pre-amp and had two channels – easy enough to jump between them with the accompanying foot switch – but whenever Bitty tried to use his distortion pedal, the sound went blurry in the wrong direction. “It’s your piece-of-shit equipment!” Jack yelled when Bitty broached the question, but later Lardo pushed a warmish can of Natty Ice into Bitty’s hand and explained, “Jack’s just having a fit because of the show tomorrow. And because he’s mad the boat’s not winter-proofed yet. I mean, your pedal is totally garbage, but his Fender can’t handle external distortion for shit. And it’s cold.”

“Yeah, it is cold,” Bitty agreed, popping the can open and snagging a hangnail on the tab, which was how he ended up on the stage in Lardo’s queer anarchist collective’s building with a bunch of band-aids layered onto his shredded left ring finger.

Given that their band was still nameless and had only existed for three weeks, they were first in the lineup; this also pissed Jack off, but Bitty kind of liked that no one was there to see him fumble through sound check, or wince from the cracking shriek of feedback he accidentally sent through all the speakers at full-volume when he got too ambitious with the Fender’s dials, or overhear him say, “It’s kinda funny that the stage doesn’t come up off the floor, isn’t it?”

“Don’t let the guys hear you say that!” Shitty hissed, fiddling with the cord as it once again slipped out of his fucked-up input. “They take being non-hierarchical really seriously here.” He glanced over at Bitty, conspiratorial. “It’s not a stage, it’s a horizontally-organized performance space.”

“Oh, right,” said Bitty, his cheeks hot, the only part of him that had felt warm in weeks.

_X_

“Is that the Royal We you’re referencing?”

“Ha ha. About that,” Zimmermann says. I hold my breath. But just as Zimmermann seems like he’s ready to share, mouth open, shoulders tensed, Bittle appears at the table.

“Hey y’all!” Bittle is perky despite the early hour. He’s still short and trim and blond, still cute, although the twenty years since those old photos sit in the crow’s feet that crinkle when he smiles at us. His Southern accent – Georgian? Alabamian? Definitely not Texan – is stronger than it seemed in the long-ago demo, and I hear the occasional vowel sharpened into a New England nasal: he’s clearly lived up north for many years. “How y’all doing?”

“We’re good, bud,” says Zimmermann, with an uncharacteristically unguarded grin.

“I know you’re good,” Bittle says, smiling as he lands on some uncertain precipice between mild teasing and vicious sarcasm. They are clearly very good friends: although I’ve traveled for a week on an SMH bus and spent time backstage at several stops along the Northeast leg of SMH’s Radio Rebels tour, I haven’t seen anyone but Knight manage to land even a gentle joke at Zimmermann’s expense. “I already talked to you this morning. I was asking Miz Harada, actually.”

I’m fine, but Bittle insists, “But you could probably use some coffee, couldn’t you, what with Jack pulling you out of bed at this ungodly hour, huh?”

“Some coffee probably wouldn’t hurt,” I admit. When I transcribe the recording of this interview, later, my voice is scratchy with exhaustion.

“He used to make me get up at 5 a.m. to practice with him,” Bittle says, pulling a carafe and a mug from some mysterious pocket of ether and pouring me a fragrant cup. “He just doesn’t understand that other people have reasonable circadian rhythms.”

“And now you own a bakery,” Zimmermann mentions. His face is back in its usual flat expression, but to me his voice sounds smug. “And you get up at 5 a.m. all the time.”

“Obviously long-term exposure to your personality has warped me,” Bittle gripes, unserious, pouring two more coffees before taking our orders and whisking back to the kitchen.

When it becomes clear Zimmermann is not going to return to the previous subject, I ask, “You guys have been friends for a long time, huh?”

Knight, with an unreadable expression, huffs out a breath that ruffles his mustache.

“Almost as long as I’ve been friends with Shitty,” Jack agrees.

No man is an island, but Jack Zimmermann seems close. I grew up buying SMH CDs, watching interview after interview, and seeing them in concert for my 16th and 17th birthdays. I still follow fan conversations about them online. It’s always been clear to me that Zimmermann – who spent his childhood hiding from his father’s spotlight, whose private adolescent dramas were dogged by feverish paparazzi, and whose adulthood has only rocketed him further into fame; whose entire lifetime, in short, has been tried and tested in the court of public opinion – is a man of few words, and of fewer friends. Although he clearly has a good working relationship with his bandmates of 20 years, before interviewing him for this profile I wouldn’t have been able to tell you whether he genuinely likes any of them.

It is my great privilege and delight to inform you that he absolutely does.

_X_

**ONE WEEK // ONE BAND**

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 _Showing 18 posts tagged_ _#jack zimmermann_

**whoiamwhoami :**

Okay. Okay.You know I couldn’t talk about Jack Zimmermann without mentioning Rimouski, at least briefly. Forgive me – you can check out **@cleavetome** ’s Rimouski entries **here** ; like Rimouski itself, they are unexpectedly experimental, succinct, emotional, and brilliant – but I had to at least touch on this period of JZ’s career, and why it’s so important to understand the context of his later success, and of course why all of that matters to me, specifically.

In 2001, Zimms was 19 and a goddamn mess. (So was I, for the record: 19; a mess.) He grew up the moderately talented child of a megastar, forever lurking just outside his father’s spotlight and therefore pathologically shy – there are a few early recordings of them harmonizing on bass and guitar, Jack accompanying Bad Bob’s booming baritone in his husky tenor, where Jack’s voice is practically shaking with some uncertain tension. I also don’t want to make unsubstantiated claims about Zimmermann’s personal life or jump into the deep dark discourse surrounding it, but I _can_ tell you that the lyrics he wrote and the music he created during the _CLEAVE_ period really spoke to me as I was: a deeply depressed, closeted weirdo. Of course, it’s sometimes difficult to ascertain who wrote which parts of which songs – Parse & Zimms, as far as we’ve been able to tell, were a much more intimately collaborative writing duo than the members of SMH or Parse’s later musical partners – but there’s a gleaming edge to the songs he takes full credit for that I recognized, and that I cried over, and that I cry over still.

That’s not to deny the importance of Kent Parson’s deft touch in Rimouski, by the way; I’m a huge Parse fan, too. He’s by far the more experimental musician, and while his lyrics tend to lean towards nimble cleverness rather than Zimmermann’s raw gut-punch vulnerability, they never feel cheap. But of course, I’m not here to talk about Parse, so I’ll leave that to a future OWOB writer! (I can’t wait; I had to pick one, you know? And Jack Zimmermann, with his dear nose to the grindstone, is my forever girl. But of the two of them, Parse carries the madness of genius; it was the electricity and spontaneity of their creative partnership that made Rimouski so _good_! …And probably so unstable. Dammit.)

Anyway, the song I want to start with is “You Watch Me Now,” the very first song Rimouski ever released, the bulk of which, as far as I’ve been able to tell, was written by Zimmermann. This is the first song of their demo ( _finally_ leaked two years ago – I have no idea what took so long) and the culminating song of their first album, but more than that, it introduces the themes that Zimmermann has spent the past 20 years obsessing over: anxiety, ambition, addiction, and underneath that alliterative freneticism, the very nature of the self.

The song opens with a plaintive high cry – Zimmermann’s voice in a wordless keen – above a thudding drop-D bassline. _You see me here_ , he sings in a raw scrape, _you watch me now._ Who is that you? His dad? Parse? The audience he wasn’t sure would accept him? I don’t know who it was for Zimmermann, but for me, it’s become my mom, who was struggling to come to terms with my sexuality and who – not to get too real, here, although isn’t that what Zimmermann’s music is all about? – was about to be diagnosed with stage-IV breast cancer. _I see you watch, my tongue falls out._ In each subsequent verse, that _tongue_ becomes _heart_ becomes _eyes,_ a weird visceral disintegration.

But as with most of Zimmermann’s music, the lyrics are secondary. And it’s in “You Watch Me Now”’s chorus that Zimmermann’s voice is able to carry the weighty emotion implicit in the music. Several of Rimouski’s songs feature Zimmermann’s distinctive bass sound, but none so heavily as “You Watch Me Now,” which, as the song unfolds, veers away from the bright scream of California hardcore and towards a desperate, heavier sludge – a sound he returns to in SMH’s third album. But this is Zimmermann before SMH’s record deals and acclaim; this is Zimmermann in the months before his suicide attempt. (We often talk around this, we who love Jack Zimmermann, and I want to acknowledge he’s never confirmed that his OD was deliberate, but as far as I’m concerned? That’s almost certainly what it was.)

 _You see, you see, you see,_ this young, suicidal Zimmermann more yells than sings, never revealing exactly what the “you” sees, but evidently finding it unbearable:

 _You found all I hid.   
_ _You see, you see, you see  
_ _who I am and what I did._

Again, those words are so simple they almost disappear. But when I was 19, and a mess, and worried my mother wouldn’t love me anymore – when my mother wept and asked me about grandchildren, and then died before I could tell her whether or not she could expect them – when I got married, last year, and I had to guess how my mother would feel about it, whether she’d be happy, what she would want for me – I listened to this song over and over and over again.

I’ll talk more about Zimmermann’s complicated relationship with seeing (and with his fame) in my next entry. But I think that’s all I can talk about for today. See you tomorrow. And while my other posts are about SMH-era JZ, if you haven’t listened to Rimouski since 2001, they’re worth revisiting…and _CLEAVE_ is on Spotify!

_X_

_X_

**Hardcore Album of the Year?**

**Post Reply** **/** **Page** **1** **…** **4** **5** **6** **7** ** >**

**-**

**Anthony** **R**.  
Forum Senior Member  
★★★★☆

Joined: July 16 2003  
Location: USA  
Status: Offline  
Points: 2712

_Posted: January 04 2007 at 15:41_

I truly do not understand why you guys all want to suck Jack Zimmermann’s musical dick so bad. I’m not saying that to be a jerk, I truly truly truly want to support you all, don’t tell my mom but you all know this forum is my basically my family, but SMH isn’t even hardcore, guys! They’re basically pop punk!

Plus I hate that we have no idea what SMH actually stands for, it’s pretentious and it sucks. (So Much Hate? Such Miserable …Hastards? Socks Mittens Hats?)

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**Meddlin  
**Music Reviewer  
★★★☆☆

Joined: April 22 2005  
Location: Germany  
Status: Offline  
Points: 23902

_Posted: January 04 2007 at 15:57_

Agreed. It’s not that I don’t like SMH. I like them the same way I like inexpensive candy. But hardcore album **of the year**? That’s crazy.

It’s definitely a decent album on the technical side. But I just feel a little bored. I’m just not sure, what are they trying to say? And if they’re not trying to say anything, then what’s the the point of hardcore if it’s not to be political? Why wouldn’t you simply write some pop music and call it a day?

Oh wait, that’s what SMH did!

O.K., I like a couple of the songs more than candy. “Hard, Hard” is a pretty interesting song. I don’t absolutely understand the lyrics. What the hell does “harder to beat than tenderized meat” mean, y’know? But the bass and the beat are heavy and it makes me want to dance, so it’s like the best of the hardcore and pop punk worlds mashed together. My favorite was probably “Say It Again, Gonna Mess You Up.” Did the drummer really write the lyrics? I wonder if she can sing.

But neither of those songs is exactly hardcore, even if I like them. Where’s the rage?

-

**hardassh  
**Music Reviewer  
★☆☆☆☆

Joined: Sep 18 2006  
Location: FU  
Status: Offline  
Points: 881

_Posted: January 04 2007 at 16:04_

Yeah we know we know hardcore is for real boys and pop punk is FOR GAYS AND GIRLSSSSSSSSSSSS

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 **Anthony R.  
**Forum Senior Member  
★★★★☆

Joined: July 16 2003  
Location: USA  
Status: Offline  
Points: 2712

_Posted: January 04 2007 at 16:07_

Give it a rest, hardassh, will you? I just want to have a normal conversation about how Jack Zimmermann sold out, but you’ve taken on edgy and gone straight over. I don’t know if this is feminist performance art or if you’re just a dick, but consider this: we don’t want your opinions here! Back off! I know we’re temporarily modless for the moment because of Shawn’s life going explodey but I’ll find a way!

Pop punk is for everyone, as is hardcore, obviously, even if the bands tend to lean towards all men.

As for everyone else, okay, I know I was asking for it, tell me how Jack Zimmermann isn’t a sellout and I’m a heartless bastard….

_X_

The obvious fact that this wasn’t working - that Bitty was cold and furious and seasick; that he wanted to punch Jack in the mouth most of the time; that for all the local press they were starting to drum up thanks to Jack’s last name, SMH still kind of sucked; that Bitty, shockingly, missed his parents - didn’t appear to occur to Jack until Bitty woke up at 4 a.m. with Jack’s arm tight around him and felt so much like he was going to suffocate that he started to scream.

“I think this is a panic attack,” said Jack, about fifteen minutes into it.

“I fucking hate you so much, you piece of shit!” Bitty wheezed, trying to get his breath. “I fucking hate living on this stupid boat and being around you and being in your stupid shitty band!”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s a panic attack,” said Jack again, in his usual monotone. “It’s okay, Bits. I get panic attacks all the time. You’re going to be fine.” He patted Bitty’s shoulder mechanically.

“I know you get panic attacks all the time because I’m the one who has to clean it up when you puke! Don’t touch me! I’m going to kill you and then myself!” Bitty pushed out in a strangled yelp before he started crying too hard to talk.

Jack got up and left the bedroom without saying anything else, presumably to prevent the murder-suicide Bitty felt no jury would convict once they’d also heard Jack Zimmermann talk for 30 straight minutes about different diameters of bass strings. Lord, they’d all spent the past year hustling around Western Massachusetts to get SMH off the ground because for some godforsaken reason Jack wouldn’t ask his dad for a real loan or even a publicity shout-out, and the hot romance had fizzled, in between illegally rewiring the boat’s lights and sending desperate e-mails to undergrad sound techs with whom Jack repeatedly but unconvincingly swore he had not exchanged sexual favors. Being in SMH was - fine. It just wasn’t what Bitty had imagined after years of sneaking down to the family computer at 1 a.m. and stumbling across the riotous gay orgy of *NSYNC fanfiction.

In a fit of involuntary escapism, Bitty imagined his life without Jack: it gaped. A frisson jumped hotly from the muscle below his left ear to the center of his spine. He tried to unclench his jaw and figure out what the hell he would do without running around after Jack, cleaning up the mic cables that he always forgot, making him balanced meals in the houseboat’s inadequate little galley. He’d gotten his G.E.D. six months after moving to Massachusetts, not that it was worth much.

If they broke up, Bitty would have to leave the boat. Without access to Jack’s allowance, he didn’t have the money to live anywhere or even to get back to Georgia. He’d - God, he’d have to call his parents.

It wasn’t the first time Bitty’d changed his mind about what he wanted, though; hadn’t he gone from being tapped as a novice competitor for the 1998 Nice ’n Easy Figure Skating Classic to being the semi-competent guitarist of a semi-popular pop punk band who had finagled their way into touring the basements of three separate Massachusetts counties?

He tried to picture it, this impossible life excised of other people’s expectations, no Jack handing him a guitar, no Coach handing him a football. His brain stuttered over a memory, his mother’s sure hands guiding his own on a pastry bag, piping even lengths of choux pastry for -

“Bitty,” Jack whispered. Bitty blinked his eyes open; he hadn’t realized he’d closed them. Jack was leaning over him, a cup of tea steaming in his hands. “I brought you something to calm you down.”

“Did you get this from Shitty?” Bitty asked, poking at it suspiciously.

Jack shook his head. “Just chamomile,” he said, helping Bitty sit up, tilting the mug for him to sip.

_X_

In fact, Zimmermann tells me, he credits both his personal and professional successes to his closest relationships – that SMH’s recent renaissance with the release of their platinum seventh album, is almost entirely because of those relationships.

I have to know. I ask, as delicately as I can, whether he includes his recently and publicly rekindled friendship with former Rimouski bandmate Kent Parson in that statement.

“Oh, Kent and I never stopped being friends, exactly,” Zimmermann obfuscates, fiddling with a packet of sweetener.

Bittle, who has snuck back out of the kitchen and is arranging a beautifully latticed pie hot enough to steam up the glass cake dome on the front counter, calls out unexpectedly, “Y’all certainly made quite a splash when you started posing around town a few years ago, though, ha ha ha!”

Zimmermann accidentally rips the pink paper packet and sends a spray of sweetener into my hair. “I’m so sorry,” he says, jumping up, hovering over me, clearly unsure how to deal with – well, any of this: me shaking the sweetener out like so much saccharin dandruff, Knight’s braying laughter, Bittle’s long sigh and kind but ultimately fruitless offer of a tea towel. I reassure them all that I’m fine, and by the time everything’s settled, Bittle has somehow set full plates in front of everyone at the table and has drawn up his own chair to the booth.

“Jack’s spent a long time getting to know Kent again, as an adult,” Bittle says, clapping Zimmermann on the arm and resting his hand there, perhaps as reassurance. “It’s not his fault the media likes to pay attention to and make up silly little stories about their outings.”

“What’s that process been like?” I ask Zimmermann, hoping for a long answer so I can safely take a bite of my leek and chèvre quiche or at least its side salad of sprouts, raisins, and purple carrot shavings, which I didn’t order and which is technically contraband because I’m newly vegan, but which smells perfect enough that I fully plan to eat it anyway.

“I don’t really want to talk about Parse,” Zimmermann says, leaning incrementally into Bittle’s hand. “It was complicated. And now it’s less complicated.”

“Less complicated?” I ask.

“What Jack means to say is that they’ve both learned a lot since they were 20 years old,” Bittle offers, smiling at Zimmermann. “And that they both like coffee.”

“We do both like coffee,” Zimmermann agrees in obvious relief.

“And Jack has other things in his life besides Kent.”

“Like SMH!” Knight interjects.

“When we first talked about this interview, Lardo mentioned – and I wasn’t sure she was serious, but I thought I might as well ask – there might be a chance you’d finally be willing to divulge what, exactly, SMH means.”

Zimmermann’s face immediately turns scarlet. “Um,” he says, distinctly.

Knight breaks out into laughter again. “Oh, that’s easy! I can say it if you want,” he offers through his snickers. “If you’re too shy.”

“Um,” Zimmermann repeats. “Ha ha. Ha.”

“Don’t you bully him, B. Shitty Knight,” Bittle says, cementing my belief that in fact Knight does not have a first name beyond the initial.

“I’m just offering!”

I hold my breath. Zimmermann and Knight have some kind of silent communication that I cannot – ha – parse. Knight blows out another chuckle and looks straight at me. “It’s pretty simple. Someone’s probably guessed it online somewhere.”

“So Much Hate?” I offer, hopefully, since I have a fifteen-year-old $10 bet with my high school BFF riding on this.

“Ha! Not quite, although that’s a popular guess. Nah, Lardo came up with it when she was having a fight with Jack one night, really early on, and she screamed, ‘We should just call ourselves Super Motherfucking Homos, then,’ and we all kind of looked at each other and started laughing and that was it,” Knight reminisces, patting Zimmermann on the other shoulder.

In conclusion, here’s what I can tell you I’ve learned since starting this journey. Eric Bittle, a snappy blond from Georgia, is the owner, primary baker, and oftentimes the man behind the counter at A Friend In Knead Bakery, although he’s looking to expand so he can experiment in the kitchen a little more freely. He’s been married for a couple years to his partner of 15 years, a great guy, Jack, a local musician with a funny, charming support network of friends, most of them also musicians. The bakery is admittedly quite tiny and off the beaten path, but it’s beautiful and clean. Jack is quiet and naturally stern, but he smiles, and widely, when Bittle ribs him. And, y’all? If it’s too early for pie, order the quiche. It might not be what you came in expecting, but it’s stellar.

_X_

**Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 07:10 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

Did any of you see that insane meta post by cleavetome on tumblr? PLEASE tell me that you have because I have to talk about it or I’m going to die!

Link Reply Thread Hide 42 comments

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 07:11 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

Does SMH really count as a small fandom if it’s part of the larger bandom…polycule?

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 08:02 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

Oh, fuck off, polycule anon. Please go troll another thread.

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 08:04 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTsdKycVZZ4

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 08:20 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

No, I haven’t seen it! I don’t like cleavetome’s meta/writing style, though, I find itreally dense and annoying. Can someone recap quickly?

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 08:22 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

Oh my god, this is what I live for. Hold on to your hat:

Cleavetome has been writing some SMH epic she’s been working on for a year or whatever. I like cleavetome and her writing, so I’m actually excited about this, but I get that not everyone’s into her work. But apparently this is “a different take” than she normally writes, according to the meta post. What that means, I have no idea. She’s been doing a lot of research in order to figure out hazy details about the early years of SMH’s career. Halfway through the post she goes on a low-key pretentious rant about her job as a librarian and archivist for some university, but, lol, whatever, basically it means that she’s good at and willing to spend a lot of time researching deeply boring shit. So she spent a lot of time combing old websites for news about SMH and found some stuff about this old memberof the band who was never featured on an album, just that demo that got leaked five years ago or so, way before most of us were even writing in this fandom.

Meanwhile, maybe you remember that her BFF badbrain saw Zimms out in the wild a couple years ago at some tiny bakery in Providence and they both developed a whooooole series of headcanons about that. Full disclosure, I was into it, I won’t lie, I have bookmarks in case anyone wants them! But anyway, after that, cleavetome went FULL TINHAT and started researching this bakery and the neighborhood it’s in and has come up with a totally batshit theory about the guy who owns it. I also know she was going through some personal stuff with a sick relative, so maybe that’s why she latched onto it, but honestly it stopped being fun and it got a little bit creepy and I stopped paying attention.

But I guess she finished the research or she felt like she’d reached some conclusions about it, so of course, she wrote a post about it, and of course FFA’s gotta comment. Not saying that to be a dick, obviously here I am on FFA just salivating to comment about it.

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 08:30 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

AYRT

Oh yikes. I guess I’m not that surprised, I’ve shared a couple of fandoms with cleavetome and I feel like she’s always a little weird about her headcanons and stuff, but this kind of takes the cake. I thought we didn’t do the tinhat routine in this fandom because we’re so respectful of Zimms’s mental health issues.

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 08:49 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

DA

Haha, I think there are plenty of Rimouski tinhatters in the Cleavers fandom.

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 09:03 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

DA

Aw, c’mon, Kent/Jack in the Rimouski era doesn’t reallycount as tinhatting, it’s basically confirmed by the lyrics to “Hard, Hard” if nothing else! Not to mention all the times they’ve been seen together in public the last four years.

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 09:45 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

embarrassingly and tragically for us all, tinhats are an unavoidable part of the bandom equation, I think.

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 09:46 pm (UTC)  
(Anonymous)

Not to mention, some of the research she did is a little dubious. Like she cites a notoriously shitty university satirical newspaper as a reliable source for why she thinks SMH all lived together on a houseboat, which is an insane suggestion?

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 10:12 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

I think that did really happen, though. Well, I don’t know if all of SMH really lived on it, but I think it’s possible that Lardo did? I don’t have sources to link so I know this isn’t that believable but I’m from that area of Massachusetts and although I wasn’t old enough to be going to shows when SMH was just starting, I’ve heard there really was an art collective that lived on a houseboat in the Samwell until the town finally got sick of it and basically ordered them to leave.

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 10:14 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

And then the whole bus clapped.

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 10:14 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

whole boat.* Damn, ruined my sick burn.

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 10:27 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

Okay, you don’t have to be a sarcastic dick about it. 

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 **Re: Small Fandoms - SMH RPF  
**Date: 2019-05-14 11:47 pm (UTC)   
(Anonymous)

What else is meme for but mocking peoplewe know and love, and mocking strangers,and mocking strangers we think we know and love because we’ve watched 87 interviews in the past 48 hours (or maybe that’s just me)?

_X_

**Jack’s Journal  
**A journal about music, photography, and occasionally hockey.

**Recent Entries Archive Friends Profile Memories**

4 July 2002 @ 10:21 PM

( **This is Parse’s fault. Ha ha.** )

Current mood: Okay  
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Tags: Photos, Parse

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1 July 2002 @ 1:27 AM  
Friends Only

I don’t like these meds. I want to go back to my old prescription.

Current mood: Okay  
Current music: Blink-182 - Adam’s Song

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29 June 2002 @ 2:59 AM  
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Summer is always my least favorite part of the year. The heat is bad. Time stretches.

Current mood: Okay  
Current music: Black Flag - Nervous Breakdown

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28 June 2002 @ 9:46 PM

Last week, I was talking to **sounddude** about bass strings and why you might want to look at a thicker gauge. A standard E string, for example, has a .105” diameter. This is fairly easy to play. But the sound will not be as deep or resonate as profoundly, even with a good amp setup, as a .110” E string. This will also allow you to tune into drop-D or even further without worrying about whether your strings will break.

( **Of course, there is also the debate between steel and nickel strings to consider.** )

Current mood: Okay  
Current music: Green Day - Nice Guys Finish Last  
Tags: Bass, Music Gear 

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25 June 2002 @ 2:52 PM   
Friends Only

Sometimes when you’re working with someone on music, they don’t see it the same way you do. And that is frustrating. When I was a kid I was usually frustrated. It felt like I couldn’t ever get people to see the things the way I did. But it doesn’t have to be frustrating. Parse and I see a lot of things the same way. Not always, though.

The solution is usually more bass. :^]

Current mood: Okay   
Current music: God Is My Co-Pilot - List   
Tags: Band Stuff, Parse

10 CommentsLeave a CommentShareFlagLink

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21 June 2002 @ 9:46 PM

( **I took some pictures. There were a lot of geese.** )

Current mood: Okay  
Current music: The Hidden Cameras - Heavy Flow of Evil  
Tags: Photos

390 CommentsLeave a CommentShareFlagLink

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20 June 2002 @ 7:32 PM

I was recently discussing with **funkymusicwhiteboy** different brands of basses and how they are all very different and why I use the bass I use.

The electric bass guitar wasn’t invented by Leo Fender, although many people will tell you it was; in fact, the electric bass was first invented by a man named Paul Tutmarc, who lived in Seattle. However, Fender essentially invented the first mass-produced electric bass, the P-Bass, which meant he could sell them to more musicians than the handful of people who came through his shop. This was in 1951, so fairly early in the history of electric instruments. By the time he finished, these basses used a single coil pickup. I will address jazz vs. rock pickups later, but this is how Squier basses became and remain very popular. I have learned how to play using a Squier bass but I sold it a while ago for various reasons. Right now I’m using an inexpensive vintage Washburn bass that I picked up in L.A. I like it a lot. It’s a prototype, though, so it has some issues. I am thinking about getting an Ibanez at some point.

Although it’s not my preferred instrument, I do also play guitar, and I can tell you that for each manufacturer tends to have very different results.

( **Squier vs. Ibanez vs. Washburn vs. Others, observations and thoughts.** )

Current mood: Okay   
Current music: Blatz - Lullabye  
Tags: Bass, Music Gear

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18 June 2002 @ 3:03 AM  
Friends Only

Touring is weird. I’m getting used to it. At my age my dad had his first platinum record. We are having a slower start. But people seem to like our music. I like our music too, although not better than I like my dad’s. So at least that’s something.

Current mood: Okay   
Current music: The Dicks - Hate the Police    
Tags: Band Stuff, Parse

28 CommentsLeave a CommentShareFlagLink

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14 June 2002 @ 3:03 AM  
Friends Only

Parse told me he wants my LiveJournal password or at least to be on my f-list. I told him no. He didn’t like that too much. But he doesn’t have to show me all his Xanga posts like he does. Sometimes I like to write for myself. And for you guys, I guess. But you don’t have to read this stuff unless you want to.

Current mood: Okay   
Current music: Pansy Division - Deep Water   
Tags: Parse

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7 June 2002 @ 5:31 PM  
Friends Only

New prescription.

Current mood: Okay   
Current music: Leftöver Crack - Born to Die 

24 CommentsLeave a CommentShareFlagLink

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**badbrain** on Chapter 4  
Sun 30 Sep 2019 11:38 EDT

OKAY, MARCI CLEAVETOME, LISTEN. You know I love you. You know I sat with you all through this project and beta’d every chapter and that I adore your writing pretty much always. You also already know what I’m going to say, because I’ve said it to your face, but I’m gonna say it here too, just for the public record. And that’s that I’M PROUD OF HOW GOOD THIS IS AND HOW HARD YOU WORKED AND HOW MUCH FRANKLY INSANE RESEARCH YOU DID, BUT I ALSO COMPLETELY HATED THIS STORY!

I mean, you did a fucking cool thing - I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Cleavers fic that wasn’t Zimms/Parse, Zimms/SMH, or on the exceedingly rare het side, Zimms/Camilla. Obviously bandom is always obsessed with “canon” details, and I think, because our fandom is relatively small and because we’re given so little to work with (not even ONE stage kiss, unfair), since everyone involved is sooooo goddamn private. I mean, ethically, IDK what the hell that Bitty guy’s up to now or if he appreciates his name being porned up, but since none of us knows his real name, and given how much unfiltered X-rated RPF I personally have leaked onto the internet, I’m not the one to have that argument.

But anyway, whatever, you’ve been in this fandom about as long as I have, and you know the versions of the characters we’ve all cooked up together as well as I do, and you’ve written some of the most BEAUTIFUL stories in this damn fandom already. My faaaave fairytale Zimms of all time is your Prince Jack, and you know how I love a fairytale. So I get why you had to do something else. But even though I thought your characterization was really interesting, and that your descriptions were wild and fun, and even though I loved Bitty - whoever the hell that guy is, I now fully believe in THIS version of him - I just…felt conflicted the whole time.

Obviously, there are all sorts of ways to read into Zimms’ extremely limited media presence, and we’ve talked about it endlessly over the past five years, whether he’s got emotional problems because he grew up in an insanely wealthy and famous therefore dysfunctional family, and/or if he’s on the spectrum, and/or if he has half a dozen other brain situations that we’re intimately familiar with, and/or if he’s just a self-centered dick with a lot of money, and/or how his, to borrow a word from another fandom era, woobification in the Cleavers fandom has impacted any of our views of that stuff. And I respect the choices you made in this fic, which I think were probably hard choices, given how tenderly you write Zimms in other fic. But god, I couldn’t wrap my head around it emotionally. Does that make sense? I bought into this version and it made me uncomfortable because I’m really attached to a different Zimms. Does that make any sense?

I know I ragged on you the whole time about the hausboat but I finally saw and clicked on that Wayback Machine link to that old Swallow article you put in your author’s note that I kept forgetting to read during the actual beta process. That stuff was wild. SMH really lived and performed on a boat?? What were they thinking??

Plus, ultimately, and you know this has nothing to do with your writing, I just don’t find the relationship convincing given the REAL LIFE EVIDENCE, lmao. Zimms and Parse? No problem. Zimms and Shitty? Of course. Zimms and Shitty and Lardo? You know I live for it. You know I think the real Zimms is probably gay, and I totally buy that maybe he and the real Bitty did hook up, or whatever, and maybe that’s even part of why Bitty left the band and joined a bakery (I know you’re more of a conspiracy theorist than I am but I DID love that little bit of fantasy. Bakery AU next?). But…like, this is the question I keep asking you: where’s Bitty now? We see Parse and Zimms together regularly, we see Zimms and SMH together all the time, ofc. There are photos all over. But where’s Bitty in that? Then again, that’s the question RPF is dealing with, I guess, right?

Anyway, even though this story SHOOK ME TO MY CORE and I feel COMPLICATED about it, I love it because you wrote it, and because I love this stupid fandom from the bottom of my heart.

Now write me 100,000 more words of shapeshifter soft-A/B/O political romance enemies-to-lovers marriage of convenience Befallen Prince Jack/Prince Of Rich Neighboring Kingdom Ransom, plz!!!


End file.
